[Suggestion: reinstate a level unlock for epic ATs]

I don't think EATs need an unlock condition, probably just a notice that they're ATs for advanced players on the AT selection screen.

[Safeguard/Mayhem Badges]

Earn the Villain Disruptor badge, and you’ll unlock a contact who will give you any, and as many, safeguard missions as you want.

[So, Torchbearer! When are we gonna start raiding Hamidon?]

I’m not sure my home server of Triumph ever successfully did a nu-Hami raid, but those old Hami raids before issue 9 are some of my fondest memories of the game. We should get them going again!

[Spotlights By Tram Stations]

They aren't gone, though?

[Homecoming Server Update: Moves, XP, and EU!]

Personally I'm not a fan of the free XP boosts; even on the secret server they were priced so that they cost more than a character power-leveling a boosted character would earn getting them from 1-50. I think there should be a price involved, maybe a merit cost or something?

 

 

The cost is less Influence from kills.

 

50% + less influence after 40 is a pretty big deal, as you can routinely pull in several hundred thousand per mission. Even more if you're on a farm team etc (which most people who use these buffs will be, lets be honest)

That's a cost for the character getting powerleveled. The character doing the powerleveling would still make inf while farming, and that's where the inf cost of the bonus came from

[Homecoming Server Update: Moves, XP, and EU!]

Personally I'm not a fan of the free XP boosts; even on the secret server they were priced so that they cost more than a character power-leveling a boosted character would earn getting them from 1-50. I think there should be a price involved, maybe a merit cost or something?

 

I'm glad to hear the chat log is coming back for the purpose of preventing harassment; that was exactly the concern I had about removing it in the first place.

[Wentworth's]

Good info to know. But the result is going to be IO's are going to be more expensive at lower levels. Also why not just have Wentworth's list one IO instead of one for every level? What level it is makes no difference.

The reduced merit prices should keep recipe prices down across the board (especially if they'd revert the reward for reinforcing as a Hero or Villain  >:(). And the level you buy IOs at still matters, because that determines whether you keep set bonuses when you exemplar, and it's important for players to be able to bid on IOs before they can actually use them, or for use on other characters.

[Wentworth's]

No, you can't buy from yourself.

[Rikti War Zone Badges Missing?]

Yeah, moving the badges to the echoes makes no sense.

[Need Help Creating a Specific Macro...]

That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through to avoid using the /get_global_name command or just clicking their name in the chat box and hitting that option on the menu that appears.

[safeguards and mayhem's in ouroborus?]

Issue 25 added contacts that let you do that once you earn the Villain Disruptor badge for heroes, and some other badge for villains, don't actually know which one there.

[Was this mission contact on "live"?]

It was gonna be part of i24.

[Bring back the merits for Tip missions]

With the nerf, I don't really see a point to running tips beyond seeing the missions once and getting the badges. I'm pretty sure I can get merits faster via flashbacks (the old Psyche TF looks encouraging), and Null the Gull can change alignment... hrm.

Yeah, this change makes tip missions pretty pointless. Still better than newspaper missions if you've gotten the Mayhem/Safeguard temp power for your level range, but there's very little reason to do them now.

[What was the name of that really funny superhero on Virtue?]

Ascendant.

[Merits]

No level minimum, you get them from doing TFs, story arcs, and defeating giant monsters.

[Secondary Empathy power]

Defenders have possibly the lowest raw damage in the game, so from a pure effectiveness standpoint it's best to choose your secondary based on its secondary effects, like the -Recharge in Psi and Ice, or the -ToHit in Dark.

[Bring back the merits for Tip missions]

If you were to skip past as much of the tip missions as possible, only defeating the mobs you had to (especially at -1, x1, no bosses), it was pretty likely you'd run out of tips. That's where buying them would come in.

I was right, I definitely do not have the right mindset.  I'm more of a "clean your plate, lick the spoon, and suck up all the crumbs off the table cloth" kind of guy.  :)

You and me both. We're the kind of player that this change hurts the most.

[Bring back the merits for Tip missions]

Also, things are much cheaper than they were in the old days. I don't remember after all this time but is this really a nerf when compared to the buying power reward merits have now over what hero/villain merits had back then?

With the cost reductions you mentioned, it felt to me like 50 merits kept pace with the purchasing power tip missions had in the old days, but 20 merits puts us behind where we were.

That's pretty much exactly what the 50 merits per alignment mission did. On Live, one alignment merit would get you most rare recipes. Some, like LotG +Recharges and uniques were two, and PvP and Purples were more expensive, but for the most part 50 merits/alignment mission was keeping pace.

 

If I can go back to the point raised earlier about buying tip missions, I don't get how that's any sort of advantage. Maybe I don't have the proper speed gaming mindset, but what's the point? I always seem to get my next tip while I'm in the current tip mission, the only time I'm not ahead of the game like that is right after an alignment mission when the whole thing resets. What am I missing?

If you were to skip past as much of the tip missions as possible, only defeating the mobs you had to (especially at -1, x1, no bosses), it was pretty likely you'd run out of tips. That's where buying them would come in.

[Bring back the merits for Tip missions]

You're just buying the tip, you still need to do the mission.

[Bring back the merits for Tip missions]

Yesterday's change to the reward merits for Tip missions is the first thing the Homecoming team has done that I really don't agree with. Before yesterday, reinforcing your alignment as a Hero or Villain gave 50 Reward Merits; now it gives 20. This is a huge nerf.

 

Now I understand that setting your difficulty to the lowest level and buying tips with the supergroup base computer would allow you to grind out merits extremely quickly, and maybe for that, 50 merits (40 if you buy all your tips) was too much. But for players like me who liked to run tips at a leisurely pace, this is a huge disservice. Tips allowed us to work for a good reward at a leisurely pace without having to commit to teams or locking us into a TF. It seems likely to me that the real concern here was the aforementioned lowest-difficulty tip-speedrunning method, so limiting alignment missions to one per day, or removing the ability to buy tips so players had to clear more enemies to get them drop, is a much better option. It would curb the highest-payout methods of doing tips without punishing the more deliberate methods players like myself used.

[Tip Missions]

That's not cool; those merits were incredibly useful. That's a huge nerf. I would much rather they have reinstated the timer or limited it to 1 morality mission a day, because grinding those missions isn't fun.

[Are Alignment Merits just not a thing on these servers?]

Rogue and Vigilante morality missions give 20 merits now. With the reduced merit prices in i25, that's pretty much equal to the amount they got on live compared to an alignment merits.

[WentWorth Bidding Bug?]

This is a change they made for i25. Buyers can buy recipes at any level, regardless of what level the seller’s item is. For example, if someone puts up a level 50 Thunderstrike recipe, but you want it at level 40, you put a bid on a level 40 Thunderstrike and that level 50 recipe is converted to a level 40 recipe when you buy it.

[Hero/Villain Merit problems.]

Not a bug, alignment merits have been mostly phased out in i25. Hero and villain morality missions give 50 reward merits, which can now be used to buy virtually everything; uncommon recipes are 20 merits, rare recipes 50, and purple recipes, PVP recipes, and attuned enhancements cost 100. Since reward merits do everything now, alignment merits only exist to be converted to and from reward merits at a rate of 1:50, to make it easier to email reward merits between characters.

[Eden Trial: two bugs]

I ran an Eden trial yesterday on Torchbearer, and encountered two bugs of note.

 

The first bug we found was that attempting to run the trial with a time limit caused the trial to fail instantly; we made two attempts with the "Silver challenge" time limit for the TF and as soon as we set foot inside the door mission we were booted out in failure. Starting the TF with no challenges for our third attempt enabled let us do the mission as normal.

 

The second bug I can't verify, but a teammate reported that they chose the Titan enhancement award at the end of the trial and didn't receive it. Since Titan enhancements have been buffed to be as strong as Hamidon enhancements (though they drop at -2) and can be combined with Hamidon enhancements in i25, I feel like this is probably the more concerning bug of the two we encountered.